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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store is an independently run bookstore serving the greater Cambridge area. The bookstore is located in Harvard Square and has been family-owned since 1932. We are known for our extraordinary selection of new, used and remaindered books and for a history of innovation. In 2009, we introduced same-day "green delivery" and a book-making robot capable of printing and binding any of millions of titles in minutes. Find out more about us at www.harvard.com.

http://www.harvard.com

  • By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, philosopher Jacob Stanley reveals in _How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them_ that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals. For this conversation Stanley is joined by Harvard associate professor of History Elizabeth Hinton.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working-class Americans living in the heartland. Smarsh's personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • Women are angry, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. Following in the footsteps of classic feminist manifestos like The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Rage Becomes Her is an eye-opening book for the twenty-first-century woman: an engaging, accessible credo offering us the tools to re-understand our anger and harness its power to create lasting positive change. Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning writer and activist SORAYA CHEMALY for a discussion on her new book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger. She is joined in conversation by JACLYN FRIEDMAN, author of Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All. Image: Book Cover
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    Harvard Book Store
  • We live in a time of alarming and bewildering change: the breakup of the post-1945 global order, numerous species facing extinction, and perhaps the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. In his book 'We’re Doomed. Now What?' he addresses this time of crisis through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death―and the truth about their marriage―in Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery. Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way. The Third Hotel is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school―in her sixties―to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In _Old in Art School_, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what “An Artist” is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? _Old in Art School_ is Nell Painter’s ongoing exploration of those crucial questions, drawing on insights from two careers. Read about Nell Painter, ageism, and "disappearing women" [here](https://medium.com/@ForumNetwork/disappearing-women-nell-painter-and-christine-lahti-e508da6b5271 "Disappearing Women: Nell Painter and Christine Lahti"). Photo: [Time](http://time.com/5318242/nell-painter-old-in-art-school/ "This Woman Went to Art School in Her 60s, Proving It’s Never Too Late to Pivot")
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    Harvard Book Store
  • Across cities, towns, and campuses, Americans are grappling with overwhelming challenges and the daily fallout from the most authoritarian White House policies in recent memory. Jeff Biggers reframes today’s battles as a continuum of a vibrant American tradition. Resistance is a chronicle of the courageous resistance movements that have insured the benchmarks of our democracy―movements that served on the front lines of the American Revolution, the defense of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the defeat of fascism during World War II, and landmark civil rights and environmental protection achievements.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • Hanna Holborn Gray, the first woman president of a major American University, discusses her debut memoir, _An Academic Life_ with historian, author, and Harvard professor Jane Kamensky. _An Academic Life_ is a candid self-portrait by one of academia's most respected trailblazers. Gray describes what it was like to grow up as a child of refugee parents, and reflects on the changing status of women in the academic world. She discusses the migration of intellectuals from Nazi-held Europe and the transformative role these exiles played in American higher education—and how the émigré experience in America transformed their own lives and work. She sheds light on the character of university communities, how they are structured and administered, and the balance they seek between tradition and innovation, teaching and research, and undergraduate and professional learning. An Academic Life speaks to the fundamental issues of purpose, academic freedom, and governance that arise time and again in higher education, and that pose sharp challenges to the independence and scholarly integrity of each new generation.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • ESPN writer and NPR sports correspondent Howard Bryant presents his latest book, _The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism_. It used to be that politics and sports were as separate from one another as church and state. Today, sports arenas have been transformed into staging grounds for American patriotism and the hero worship of law enforcement. But as journalist Howard Bryant reveals, this has always been more complicated for black athletes, who from the start, were committing a political act simply by being on the field. The Heritage is the story of the rise, fall, and fervent return of the athlete-activist. Bryant details the collision of post-9/11 sports in America and the politically engaged post-Ferguson black athlete.
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    Harvard Book Store
  • Looking at Great Britain's decision to leave the European Union in 2016, what can we learn? In his new book, _Making Sense of Brexit: Democracy, Europe, and Uncertain Futures_, Vic Siedler addresses the causes and implications of Brexit. He argues that we need new political imaginations across class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality to engage in issues about the scale and acceleration of urban change and the time people need to adjust to new realities. Photo: [Pixbay](https://pixabay.com/en/brexit-output-emergency-exit-eu-1477302/ "")
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    Harvard Book Store